Don't Lose Your Mind won the Silver Ennie for Best Writing. I was the minor-key element in that -- I did the layout, sure, and came up with the high concept for the book, but it was Benjamin "Bailywolf" Baugh's killer writing and Ryan Macklin's insightful, demanding editing job that honed that crazy blade to a keen edge. I'm very proud of them for this win.

Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies won the Silver Ennie for Best Setting. Chad Underkoffler gets a mountain of credit here as well, though I am all the same still very smug and satisfied about this one, as I really pushed Chad hard to deliver the kind of setting presentation that *I* could remain interested in (I am a notoriously hard sell when it comes to setting writing). Seeing it win was a real validation of the hard work Chad put in to make that goal a reality.

Great job, guys! And thank you so much for being a part of the Hat.

That makes three silvers in three years for us, I think (the first went to Spirit of the Century a couple back). Crazy-pleased, that's me. :)

You can pick up both products at the Evil Hat webstore: http://www.evilhat.com/store/

As well as IPR and DriveThruRPG!

Thanks be to boxninja for snapping these photos of the IPR booth at GenCon 2009:





(Clickin' on 'em will get you biggers.)

EDIT: And some Hero 6th Edition stuff too. What's odd and wonderful about this is seeing physical manifestations of stuff I've worked on. (Steve Long hit the copy shop and got one-off printouts of the two books done up so folks can browse the new edition. Also, see the preorder CDs done up for the con!) These ones are thanks to gamera_spinning.

(Ennie-Nominated) Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, seen at the IPR booth at GenCon:



You can pick up all of Evil Hat's games there, including A Penny For My Thoughts (look around and see if Paul's there, so he can demo it for you), Don't Rest Your Head, (Ennie-Nominated) Don't Lose Your Mind, and (Ennie-Silver-Winner) Spirit of the Century.

And as mentioned on @IPRTweets, IPR's booth number at GenCon is 2139. Drop on by (wish I could)!

The Ennie Awards polls are open!

http://www.ennie-awards.com/voting/ballot.asp

Evil Hat and One Bad Egg are up for several categories this year, and I'd really appreciate it if the fans got out the vote on this one. It's been a wild ride of a year, producing some products I'm just goofily proud of, and it would be exactly the right kind of endcap to see a win or two come out of it.

If you're looking to support the indie game community in general with your votes, do check out Luke & Brennan's picks over at the Summer Revolution: http://www.summer-revolution.com/

Ryan Macklin has also posted a bit of a PSA about the Ennie Awards:

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So, the 2009 Ennie Award Nominations are out this morning:

http://www.ennie-awards.com/nominations/nominees.asp

As someone on Twitter said, my fingerprints are all over 'em. This is good, because I like the Ennies, and it's really great when the Ennies like me back. I'm already a proud papa lately, but this magnifies the feeling, and for my other 'babies' to boot. :)

Evil Hat's Nominations

• Best Writing - Don't Lose Your Mind
  
• Best Setting - Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies
  
• Product of the Year - Don't Lose Your Mind
  
• Product of the Year - Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies

One Bad Egg's Nominations

• Best Electronic Book - The Death Mother
  
• Best Electronic Book - Hard Boiled Armies

I declare TRIUMPH with chadu at this point, since we went back and forth on the presentation of the Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies' setting so much, and lo and behold a BEST SETTING nomination. Yes, I'm jazzed as all hell for having two entries on Product of the Year (out of 10), but the setting nod is the real marker there as ultimate validation of the goal we had in producing S7S.

And Ben Baugh getting BEST WRITING for his work on Don't Lose Your Mind? Well, yeah. He did such wonderful things with language and vignettes and all that in DLYM, I would have been sorely disappointed if that hadn't gotten a specific nod, too.

The One Bad Egg stuff is a happy thing, finally, as that's the place where I actually wrote some stuff this year instead of doing higher-level production and layout stuff. I'm a little startled that Armies and Mother beat out Cultures (Cultures has been a consistent strong seller) for nomination, but they're both results from me working at the top of my game at OBE, so I'm pretty tickled.

It doesn't stop there, though, as I look towards the question of "What non-Fred IPR-carried products got the nod?"

IPR Nominations

• Best Cover Art - 3:16 (BoxNinja)
  
• Best Interior Art - HELLAS (Khepera)
  
• Best Interior Art - Mouse Guard (Archaia)
  
• Best Writing - Hot War (Contested Ground)
  
• Best Production Values - Mouse Guard (Archaia)
  
• Best Production Values - HELLAS (Khepera)
  
• Best Rules - Starblazer Adventures (Cubicle 7)
  
• Best Setting - Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor (Arc Dream)
  
• Best Setting - Hot War (Contested Ground)
  
• Best Podcast - Voice of the Revolution (IPR!)
  
• Best Game - Starblazer Adventures (Cubicle 7)
  
• Product of the Year - Mouse Guard (Archaia)
  
• Product of the Year - Starblazer Adventures (Cubicle 7)

I'm mixed, of course, in my feelings about Mouse Guard. Mouse Guard is a fine work, worth the nods it has gotten (and more that it curiously didn't). But Luke and I are on the outs (something I don't really want to talk about, but also don't want to pretend isn't true) after he decided that it was more important to spit in my face than accept an apology for a big goof-up I made earlier this year. As such, I am doubtful that I'll be continuing The Summer Revolution past this year, and am on the fence as to whether I'll use that promotional site this year at all, since it was based on a partnership with Luke, and Luke's temper makes him a poor partner for me. I might be giving Mouse Guard some vote love, but that love's all for Archaia at this point.

Anyway, enough of that drama.

Overall, that's a pretty good spread. It's a great spread from the Evil Hat perspective, too, given that Starblazer Adventures is based on the Spirit of the Century SRD, but I'm also intrigued that IPR's catalog includes three of the five Best Setting nods, given that I think there's a sort of general perception out there that "indie means setting light". I'm sad that Master Plan isn't on the Podcast list, but Ryan's influence is still strongly felt, as he's been doing the audio production on Voice of the Revolution, which has improved the show's quality in all sorts of subtle-but-palpable ways. Don't Lose Your Mind author Ben Baugh is getting some love for Candlewick, too, which is good & just; he's probably one of my top five setting authors these days anyway, and it's *hard* to get me to love setting writing.

In the end sum, it's important to realize that in one very big way, the Ennies are already done for us (speaking in the smaller EHP/OBE sense, and in the larger IPR sense). Nominations are hard-won and carefully considered by the judges each year, but the voting is in the hands of the general public. It's particularly hard getting actual wins from that everyone-in-the-world vote; our catalogs do their best work not in quantity, but in quality, so to some extent creating the product familiarity necessary to garner a vote is the biggest obstacle of all.

So when you hear folks on the above list say things like, "It's an honor just to be nominated" -- and it is! -- listen a little closer. That nomination they're talking about is a win all by itself.

Edit: Chad's post: http://chadu.livejournal.com/743514.html

Second Edit: Somehow I failed to mention I did the layout on Starblazer Adventures, so I have an actually-palpable connection to that product beyond contributing to the SRD on which it's based.

(These are all from http://www.flickr.com/photos/8365266@N05/page42/ in case external links don't work.)